Skip to Content
GuidesChannelsiMessage

iMessage setup

Text your agent like you’d text a person. Cohort gives your workspace a dedicated iMessage line that goes to your workspace’s default agent. In a new workspace that is Mara, your personal assistant. In a workspace that chose its team during setup, it is the agent that had the role then, often Kenji, the Chief of Staff. You connect your phone number, send one text to pair, and from then on the conversation lives in Messages alongside everyone else you talk to.

There is nothing to install: no Mac, no Terminal, no helper apps. Cohort hosts the line.

Availability. iMessage runs on shared hosted capacity. If the connect wizard reports that iMessage is at capacity, try again later — capacity expands over time.

Connecting

  1. In Cohort, go to Settings → Channels and click Connect on the iMessage card.
  2. Enter your phone number — the one you’ll text from, in full international E.164 format, such as +14155550100.
  3. The wizard shows you your agent’s iMessage line. Text it from your iPhone.
  4. Your first text completes the pairing and goes straight to your agent as the first turn of the conversation. It can answer what you wrote right away; you don’t have to send it again after a setup reply.

That’s the whole setup. Leaving the wizard before texting the line discards the connection; you can reconnect any time.

What the conversation is like

  • The first text is a real message. It isn’t consumed as a pairing code or replaced with a canned welcome. If this is your first direct conversation with your default agent, it’s set to answer what you wrote first, say in a line what it handles, and suggest one thing you can ask it for next.
  • One front door. Your default agent answers what it can. When your team has other agents, it hands the rest to the teammate who owns it as a Cohort task, then tells you who has it.
  • It’s a thread, not one-shots. The conversation keeps its context across texts — ask a follow-up tomorrow and the agent knows what you were talking about.
  • Changing channels doesn’t start the relationship over. Cohort recognizes the same person and agent across supported one-to-one channels in the workspace, so connecting iMessage after another channel doesn’t replay the first-conversation introduction.
  • It feels native. You’ll see the typing indicator while the agent composes.
  • Rapid-fire texts read as one thought. Send three quick messages and the agent responds to all of them together instead of replying three times.
  • Agents can text you first. An agent can start a conversation, but only with numbers linked to it, no more than a few times a day, and with every message it sends logged.
  • If a reply can’t be sent right away, Cohort holds it and retries over the next day, outside overnight hours.

Memory across channels. Memory isn’t kept separately for iMessage. Your iMessage thread with an agent is a direct conversation, and a group thread is a group, remembered the same way as on every other channel: see Who hears what.

Current limits

  • Text only, in both directions. Images, attachments, voice notes, and tapback reactions aren’t carried yet.
  • One-to-one conversations, no group chats.
  • One iMessage connection per workspace.
  • iMessage always goes to your default agent. There’s no per-line agent picker; ask your default agent to bring in a teammate instead. If the agent the line was connected to is removed, a workspace admin can disconnect and reconnect iMessage to reach the current default agent.

Disconnecting

Connecting and disconnecting is for workspace owners and admins. Settings → Channels → iMessage → Disconnect. Your phone number is removed from the line’s allowlist immediately, and texts to the line stop reaching your workspace.

Last updated on
OverviewSlack